Doilies

This series combines and transforms the delicate and fragile handicraft of doilies with my drawings of rootless plants. I use manufactured paper doilies that I intricately re-cut by hand, shape and layer.

The doilies are a metaphor for the complex relationships between home and transplanted heritage, interfaced with the industrial and the domestic. I ask that we consider our transient lives, of what we carry as hand-held reminders of beauty and solace. This ‘audience-of-one’ format also invites questions of class, asking how manufactured, readily available objects alter interpretations of the traditional and handmade. I am interested in interpreting how the worlds of the industrially created coexist and collide with intimate, personal intervention.

The plants I draw are rootless yet connected, subtle symbols of the dichotomy of our live as temporary and eternal. What do we bring from one world to the next that considers our intimate, fragile, interdependence?

Some of the doilies in this series were informed by research of Thomas Jefferson’s contradictory philosophies and actions. These works were selected as a Trawick Prize Finalist, 2010.